Islam, the religion practiced by Muslims, dates back to their founder Muhammad circa — AD. While vastly different in their doctrines and worship practices, these three religions all share a belief in one God who is Creator. They also believe in prophets and a final judgment. Judaism is the oldest monotheistic religion, believing in a single deity—the one true God. Judaism began with the biblical figure Abraham.
According to the Hebrew Scriptures, God chose Abraham to become the father of a great nation that He would claim as his own, treasured covenant people Genesis ; Deuteronomy The name Judaism comes from the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve clans of Israel. The most sacred text of Judaism is the Torah , which contains the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus , Leviticus , Numbers , and Deuteronomy.
They are also called the Five Books of Moses or the Pentateuch. The Jewish Bible is called the Tanakh in Hebrew. The Decalogue is another name for the Ten Commandments. The Mishnah is a collection of oral teachings, while the Talmud contains written teachings and scriptural commentary. Jews believe in One true God who chose Israel and the Jewish people to be his representatives on the earth. Out of love, God selected them to be his witnesses to the world through pure and holy living and obedience to his laws.
Jews live in expectation of God sending a Savior, the Messiah, who will appear at the end of the age. He will rule and reign over the world with peace and prosperity. Roughly 14 million people, or about.
The angel continued to visit Muhammad for the next two decades until his death. Within years of his death, the religion of Islam stretched both east and west from the Arabian Peninsula. The doctrines of Islam are contained in six articles of faith. Muslims believe in a single God, Allah, who is eternal, creator and sovereign; angels; prophets; revelations of Allah; final judgment; and predestination. Two main branches of Islam exist, Sunni and Shia. Many credit Zoroastrianism with affecting the development of other major religions.
Zoroastrianism declined through the medieval era, and today there are fewer than , Zoroastrians as of the last reputable survey. However, there are some indications that many Kurds are converting to Zoroastrianism, which they see as an ancestral religion, which may reverse the long declining population.
Shinto is the traditionalreligion of Japan, which incorporates a vast array of local beliefs and customs across the nation. These traditions were collected and described as something like Shinto in the s CE, although the different beliefs predate this.
Shinto is, for the most part, not an organized religion, and is instead the foundationof many cultural practices in Japan. The intimately cultural quality of Shinto means that it is limited almost entirely to Japan. Hinduism is by manyaccounts the oldest religion in the world, due to its origins in Vedic beliefs dating as far back as the s BCE.
The religion has no founder, and is a synthesis of many different Indian religious traditions. The religion waxed and waned in competition with Jainism and Buddhism throughout Indian history, before seeing a huge resurgence after the medieval period. Thereafter it became the dominant religion on the Indian subcontinent.
Hinduism isone of the most geographically concentrated of the major world religions? The sheer number of practitioners, however, makes Hinduism the world's third largest religion. Buddhism is a religious tradition founded by Gautama Buddha in the early s BCE, drawing from or opposing many of the same Vedic traditions that inform Hinduism. Buddhists engagedHindus and Jains in religious dialogues for centuries, developing mutual competing traditions and beliefs.
Buddhism flourished in India, receiving support from several powerful leaders,before declining during the medieval period. Buddhism continued to grow and develop in East Asia, having a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the entire region. Buddhism is today the fourth largest religion in the world, being the majority religion of many countries in Southeast Asia, and with nearly million practitioners in China. If you're interested in learning more about Buddhism on a personal level, you can also check out our list of the best books on Buddhism.
Jainism is an ancient religious tradition from India; per its practitionersJainism is eternal, or at least older than Hinduism, but many historical estimates will place it contemporary with Buddhism as a Classical offshoot of old Vedic tradition. Like Buddhism, Jainism received varying degrees of support or opposition from powerful sponsors, and was in constant dialogue with India's other religious traditions.
Unlike Buddhism, Jainism didn't spread far outside of its home in India, and today the vast majority of the world's million Jains live in India. However, a datacollection cut-off had to be made at some point; this report is based on information available as of early For estimates of the religious composition of individual countries, see Religious Composition by Country table. For details on the methodology used to produce estimates of religious populations in countries and territories, see Appendix A.
For a list of data sources by country, see Appendix B. There are some minor differences between the estimates presented in this study and previous Pew Forum estimates of Christian and Muslim populations around the world. These differences reflect the availability of new data sources, such as recently released censuses in a few countries, and the use of population growth projections to update estimates in countries with older primary sources.
For more details, see the Methodology. This study is based on self-identification. It seeks to estimate the number of people around the world who view themselves as belonging to various religious groups.
It does not attempt to measure the degree to which members of these groups actively practice their faiths or how religious they are. In order to obtain statistics that are comparable across countries, the study attempts to count groups and individuals who self-identify as members of five widely recognized world religions — Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews — as well as people associated with three other religious categories that may be less familiar:.
Folk religions are closely tied to a particular people, ethnicity or tribe. In some cases, elements of other world religions are blended with local beliefs and customs. These faiths often have no formal creeds or sacred texts.
Examples of folk religions include African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions. The religiously unaffiliated population includes atheists, agnostics and people who do not identify with any particular religion in surveys. However, many of the religiously unaffiliated do hold religious or spiritual beliefs.
The Buddha lived and taught in the eastern part of ancient India, providing the template for a faith based on the ideas of moral rectitude, freedom from material attachment or desire, the achievement of peace and illumination through meditation, and a life dedicated to wisdom, kindness, and compassion.
Though its scriptures and traditions inform countless subsequent sects and ideologies, Buddhism is largely divided into two branches: Theravada — the goal of which is to achieve freedom from ignorance, material attachment, and anger by practicing the Noble Eightfold Path, all in pursuit of a sublime state called Nirvana; and Mahayana — the goal of which is aspire to Buddhahood by practicing the Zen principles of self-control, meditation, and expression of the insight of Buddha in your daily life, especially for the benefit of others, all to the end of achieving bodhisattva, or an ongoing cycle of rebirth by which you can continue to enlighten others.
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity teaches that Jesus is the Son of God and the Messiah the savior of humanity foretold in the Torah, the primary scriptural doctrine of the Jewish faith. Christian scripture incorporates both the Torah referred to by Christians as the Old Testament with the story of Jesus, his teachings, and those of his contemporaneous disciples the New Testament. These form the Bible , the central text of the Christian faith.
This idea and its adherents spread rapidly through ancient Judea around the first century CE, then throughout the ancient world. Christians believe Jesus successfully met and completed all the requirements of the Old Testament laws, took upon himself the sins of the world during his crucifixion, died, and rose to life again so that those who place their faith in him are forgiven their sins, reconciled to God, and granted grace for daily living.
Christians maintain that heaven with God awaits them after bodily death, whereas eternal separation from God in hell awaits those who neither received forgiveness for their sins nor acknowledged Jesus as Lord. Christianity has seen countless reformation movements, which spawned innumerable sects and offshoot denominations. Combined, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with roughly 2. Its impact on the shape of world history and on present-day world culture is incalculable.
Confucianism was a dominant form of philosophy and religious orientation in ancient China, one that emerged from the teachings of Chinese philosopher Confucius, who lived — BCE. Confucius viewed himself as a channel for the theological ideas emerging from the imperial dynasties that came before him. With an emphasis on family and social harmony, Confucianism was a distinctly humanist and even secularist religious ideology.
Confucianism had a profound impact on the development of Eastern legal customs and the emergence of a scholar class and with it, a meritocratic way of governing. As Buddhism became the dominant spiritual force in China, Confucianism declined in practice. And with the emergence of communism and Maoism in the 20th century, the mainstream practice of Confucianism was largely at an end.
However, it remains a foundational ideology and force underlying Asian and Chinese attitudes toward scholarly, legal, and professional pursuits. Indeed, the strong work ethic advocated by Confucianism is seen as a major catalyst for the late 20th century rise of the Asian economies.
Today, there are various independent Confucian congregations, but it was only in that congregation leaders in China gathered together to form the Holy Confucian Church. Druze refers to an Arabic ethnoreligious group that originated in and still largely inhabits the Mountain of Druze region in southern Syria.
Despite a small population of adherents, the Druze nonetheless play an important role in the development of their region known in historical shorthand as the Levant. The Druze view themselves as the direct descendants of Jethro of Midian, distinguished in Jewish scripture as the father-in-law of Moses.
As such, the Druze are considered related to Judaism by marriage. Like their in-laws, the Druze are monotheistic, professing faith in only one God. Druze ideologies are something of a hybrid though, drawing from the cultural teachings of Islam, but also incorporating the wisdom of Greek philosophers, such as Plato, and concepts of reincarnation similar to those in Hindu canon.
Indeed, its present-day scriptures and community remain somewhat insular. The close-knit communities rooted in present day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel have long been subject to persecution, particularly at the hands of Islamic theocracies. This may be one reason that the Druze, while participating actively in the politics and affairs of their home nations, shield their customs and practices from the eyes of outsiders. Today, there are between , and one million Druze adherents, nearly all of them concentrated in the Middle East.
A term adapted in modern historical discourse, gnosticism concerns the variety of religious systems and beliefs in the ancient world that emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition. These belief systems held that emanations from a single God were responsible for the creation of the material world and that, as such, all humans carried the divine spark of God. Emerging in the first century CE — in close concert with the emergence of Christianity — gnosticism is perhaps best understand as the intermediary set of ideas shared by portions of the world as Christianity gradually eclipsed Judaism in size and scope.
During this period, — BCE, civilization transitioned from tribal and pastoral living into settled and agricultural living. From this emerged social classes, state-entities, and monarchies. The primary texts retelling this period of history are called the Vedas and would significantly inform the so-called Hindu Synthesis. The Hindu Synthesis was a period of time, roughly BCE to CE, in which the precepts of Hinduism solidified from multiple intertwining strands of Indian spiritual and cultural tradition, emerging from a broad range of philosophies to share a unifying set of concepts.
Critical among these concepts is the theme of the Four Purusarthas , or goals, of human life: Dharma ethics and duties , Artha prosperity and work , Kama desires and passions , and Moksha liberation and salvation.
Other important concepts include karma, which asserts a universal relationship between action, intent, and consequences; samsara, the Hindu concept of rebirth; and a wide range of Yogic practices merging the body, mind, and elements.
Though no one figure or group is credited with its founding, Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world today.
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